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Gamergateagain
28 Plays2 years ago
It's Back to the Conspiracy time, as Josh and M travel back to 2014 to revisit #gamergate, then go on to look at everything that flowed from it. It's almost inspiring to see how far a little hashtag has come, only it isn't.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Humorous Banter
00:00:00
Speaker
Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka Ka
00:00:44
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dintus.
00:00:56
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison here in Auckland, New Zealand and in Shuai, China. We have associate professor of philosophy who puts their pants on three legs at a time, just like everyone else. But I've said too much. It's Dr. M.R.X.Tenderth. Yeah, the zip is really causing me a bit of a bother today. Kind of really got caught in my seventh tendril. Well, you've no one but yourself to blame, I'm afraid.
00:01:22
Speaker
It's true. I just buy better pants. Or none. None at all. Always an option. Always an option. I should buy a nun. You should buy a nun. Yes. Do you know how hard it is to get a nun in this country? It's not very Christian. Genuinely, no, I don't. Well, now you do. So now, do you know how hard it is to buy a nun in this country? Answer the question. Yes.
00:01:50
Speaker
It's difficult, I've just learned. That's all I needed to know. Johnny Goodwell, now.
Podcast Format and Main Topic Discussion
00:02:00
Speaker
We had a recent comment on a YouTube version, which was six minutes of utter dross, but then it gets better. That is frankly the podcast summarised to a T. Well, that's every podcast summarised to a T. I don't think we can need to feel particularly guilty over rabbiting on about bullshit for the first short while before we actually get into the guts of the podcast, because that is what literally every podcast is.
00:02:25
Speaker
So I say to your anonymous YouTube commenter, just get used to it, quite frankly, because there is literally no other option.
Gamergate: Origins and Relevance
00:02:34
Speaker
Yes, literally no other option. You have to listen to this podcast. It is actually mandated by the UN under Section 7 of the Geneva Convention. Oh, one of them, who knows? Now, we have a back to the conspiracy episode. It's not an interview. It's not a paper review. There's nothing academical about it at all. Has the world gone mad? Yes, it has actually. You chose this topic. What drew you back to
00:03:04
Speaker
Have you been playing Minecraft or Fortnite or Overwatch or whatever online game is and have you been if you've been shouting at people online about truth in games journalism what's drawn you back to the gamer gate well? Well actually to be honest it was almost exactly the opposite.
00:03:24
Speaker
I was looking through our list of old episodes to see if there was anything worth revisiting and literally went, oh yeah, Game of Gate. I'd forgotten all about that because I think in the intervening eight years since we talked about it, there's been enough crap in that general area to occur that it's kind of eclipsed Game of Gate. And yeah, Game of Gate, in a sense, is where a lot of it all started.
00:03:49
Speaker
and in a sense never went away. So how about you play some sort of a attractive little sting and then we start talking about Gamagate again. Buckle up. We're going back to the conspiracy.
Cultural Impact of Gamergate
00:04:10
Speaker
So we talked about, when I was looking through our list of old episodes, we talked about this in episode 23, October 2014. Yes, if you're Nicolas Cage and that, no, Jim Carrey.
00:04:25
Speaker
Jim Carrey. Nicholas Cage was the other one. Yes, it is, but no. Nick Cage was knowing Jim Carrey was 23. That's the one I was thinking of. And frankly, they're both very bad films, but I actually think Knowing might be slightly better by Justin
00:04:43
Speaker
Okay. Well, that's neither here nor there, because what we're talking about today is game-agatant, and not either one of those films. Although, frankly, by the end of it, I think we'll wish we'd have changed our minds on that particular issue. So, I mean, we must all remember game-agate, at least. It hadn't occurred to me in a long while, but
00:05:04
Speaker
Surely we remember the details. We certainly, we at least remember the meme. At least we remember it's about ethics in gaming journalism. The meme that spawned from it, even if we don't remember. Really, it was never about ethics in gaming journalism. No. Well, that was the point. It was about a jilted lover getting revenge.
00:05:24
Speaker
Yes, I mean, the fact that a thousand ships did sail. They did. Yeah. I mean, the fact that it's it's about ethics and gaming journalism came to be a meme that that basically meant this is not whatever the person's talking about. That this is, you know, saying that was a byword for this is disingenuous nonsense, at least is promising, I guess. But yes, no, it started basically because a guy got dumped.
00:05:52
Speaker
A dude who was the ex of an indie game developer broke up with his girlfriend and felt compelled to write not a tweet, not a blog post, but a goddamn essay about what a horrible person his ex-girlfriend was and how utterly wrong he had been in breaking up with her. And in amongst all this, there were chapters. I haven't read it, obviously.
00:06:22
Speaker
Because who would, for God's sake? Well, obviously lots of people did, because that's how this all started. But what person with something better to do would. But yeah, in amongst all the all the whining and the whinging, there were claims that
00:06:37
Speaker
this this indie game developer who of course in this guy's eyes was just this this utter utter herrodin a jizzable of the highest order had apparently cheated on him with i assume everyone under the sun uh in his telling of it but in particular cheated on him with a guy who worked on a game's reviewing site and her being a game developer there was the implication that she'd essentially been sleeping with people so they'd give her good reviews now
00:07:06
Speaker
This immediately fell apart because it was pointed out that this the guy who she supposedly had an affair with worked for a gaming site that had never reviewed one of her games. So it's because I think from memory it was a prominent online gaming site that was Polygoth.
00:07:25
Speaker
What's that for?
00:07:45
Speaker
So it wasn't even a case of you might go, oh, we've slept together, so you can't review my game. So it'd be a case of, oh, you can sleep within your heart's content because you don't review the type of games that I write. But of course, that was beside the point.
Gamergate and Broader Cultural Tensions
00:07:59
Speaker
A lot of people decide something was rotten in the state of Denmark, where Denmark is the world of games development. I'm not sure. It's more it's more Iceland, given that their third biggest export is digital spaceships.
00:08:14
Speaker
Mmm, that does sound right. What? Is that a... What's the game? I can't even remember. Eve Online. Eve Online. Eve Online thing, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the joke goes that Finland... Sorry, Finland. Iceland exports songs by Bjork.
00:08:31
Speaker
Financial services due to their banking sector and then spaceships, but actually I think I think it actually is more fish Bjork spaceships. Probably. Bjork is an important part of the Icelandic economy. As well as she should be.
00:08:49
Speaker
But yes, Iceland slash Denmark aside, people basically, it's one of those things. It was the flashpoint. It was the Hannibal Burris having a go at Bill Cosby.
00:09:07
Speaker
spawning the entire Me Too movement. This was the one guy having a whinge and then suddenly a whole lot of stuff that had been building in certain parts of the internet about how the world was getting too liberal and too PC and too not straight white male centric.
00:09:27
Speaker
and it all sort of crystallized around this one particular complaint. So it became about not just that the gaming journalism was somehow corrupt and giving biased reviews in particular in favor of games that sort of promoted what you might think of as left-wing
00:09:49
Speaker
priorities or ethics or whatever but there were some there were some a larger conspiracy to to to what's I don't know diversify if you think diversity is a bad thing pretty much all of popular culture
00:10:04
Speaker
And part of this is due to a really interesting phenomenon. So about the time that Gamergate starts to become a big thing, gaming suddenly goes from being, using a pejorative term, a nerdy hobby to something that everybody was doing.
00:10:21
Speaker
So immediately for the old vanguard of old white men who felt they'd been gaming since the 80s and the genre belonged to them, they were suddenly confronted by the fact that there was this new onslaught, a new influx
00:10:39
Speaker
of non-old white men coming into gaming so that was immediately an issue the demographics of gaming changed but the other thing which occurs around about this time is the other phenomena which is that suddenly
00:10:54
Speaker
indie games are becoming the big hot thing so people are getting bored of AAA titles and the kind of generic gameplay loops that they're producing and people start looking at indie games and the fact that indie games have interesting game mechanics got interesting characterizations they've got really audacious plots
00:11:14
Speaker
The problem is, a lot of the people developing indie games are people who have been marginalised or ostracised from big game development. And so it turned out that the people developing a lot of the really popular indie games were women,
00:11:30
Speaker
people of colour, telling stories which were much more copacetic towards women and people of colour. So the really popular and hot games that everybody's talking about suddenly don't reflect the old white men who'd been playing games for a while, and so there was discontent and a feeling of, oh, oh, are these new people coming into the thing? Oh, oh, oh.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yes, I mean, I suppose we have to point out, as we pointed out the first time around, that the gamagate hashtag seems to have been coined by one Adam Baldwin.
Key Figures and Media Involvement
00:12:10
Speaker
Is he still around? Did he get booted off Twitter or anything, or did he just sort of fade away?
00:12:15
Speaker
So he was in that nuclear submarine TV show up until recently, the one where there's some kind of global apocalypse and there's one submarine left behind and he's one of the main characters and that ran for five years and only ended recently. So he lost a lot of friends with his
00:12:35
Speaker
avant-garde right-wingness and anti-work views, but it didn't seem to cost him any position in the media industry. I mean, he may well be on Twitter. I don't really pay attention to Twitter now that Elon Musk is in charge. Well, he's still around.
00:12:56
Speaker
It's possible, of course, that if he has been working on a show for the last five years, people have sort of said to him, don't say anything stupid on Twitter that might make us fire you or what have you. But yeah, I mean, I obviously, I never followed the guy, but I would occasionally see people like other celebrities or what have you arguing with him, things like that. But yeah, I haven't heard peep from him.
00:13:19
Speaker
in a long time, but certainly back around the time that Game of Gage was out, he very much enjoyed playing the role of this sort of internet provocateur, which basically meant troll, essentially, but with one with a slightly bigger vocabulary sometimes. Yeah, so what I always found intriguing about good old Adam Baldwin, I had to make sure I was using the right first name there. There are many, many Baldwin's.
00:13:48
Speaker
is that of course in Firefly, a show which I think is massively overrated, he played a slightly right-wing figure that the show often made fun of. He was also in Chuck as a very pro Ronald Reagan secret agent working for the CIA, and it seems that
00:14:11
Speaker
He wasn't just playing right-wing characters because he's good at playing right-wing characters. He was playing right-wing characters because that's what he is. A very right-wing caricature of a person. That said, and we mentioned this last time as well, he does still technically have the title of the best Baldwin given that he's the only one of them to appear in a Predator movie.
00:14:36
Speaker
And also he's, as far as we know, not shot someone on a set. Has never shot someone on the set of a movie, no. No. But you really shouldn't be making any jokes about it. No. But nevertheless, it is true. Adam Baldwin, as far as we know, has never shot anyone on a movie set. No.
00:14:55
Speaker
Ah, but back to Gamagate. It became a real source of conspiracy theories, hence why we talked about it before and why we're talking about it again now. Aside from the good reviews for sexual favours angle, there are ideas that game journalists
00:15:14
Speaker
there could be conflict of interest, especially because another thing that was happening around the time was the increase in crowdfunding services, your Kickstarters and what have you. So seeing gaming journalists contributing to games. That Broken Age is being solicited for on Kickstarter, the Tim Schafer game. I think Broken Age is around about this time as well. And there were concerns
00:15:40
Speaker
that Shafer & Co. went to the media to garner interest in the game in order for news outlets to write positive stories about using Kickstarter to fund a game to get people to then put money towards a game that the media were trying to, you know, enticing people into. So there were legitimate questions
00:16:06
Speaker
about the media and the game development fraternity going on which we will get into because what's kind of tragic about Game of Gate is that there were real issues and there still are real issues in the intersection between games and media and game development. It just, Game of Gate never really talked about those issues. They talked about
00:16:32
Speaker
different, possibly non-existent issues instead.
00:16:37
Speaker
Yes, exactly, because then you get into the whole culture war conspiracy type stuff with the idea that there was this bias somewhere, baked into the industry somehow, that they were shutting out the quote unquote real gamers and favouring the social justice warriors, which was a term that was just starting, I think, to show up around that time. I think it's another thing that was popping up at the time, the idea of a social justice warrior. I'm fairly sure.
00:17:06
Speaker
If I take my mind back eight years, I had a big long rant about how, how, why does anyone have any issue with the term social justice warrior? I mean, what's wrong about fighting for social justice?
00:17:22
Speaker
Well, indeed, I mean, I don't know exactly, I assume it was sort of, I mean, obviously, you know, using it as a pejorative, the idea is to imply a sort of a hypocritical virtue signaling type person who makes a whole lot of noise on the internet about things to make themselves look good. I don't know if it was like an offshoot of, because the term keyboard warrior had been around a while, again, with the connotations of someone who's all talk.
00:17:49
Speaker
and just pretends to have good views. So I'm assuming you came out of that. A keyboard warrior was a D&D class where you could only fight with keyboards like Emerson, Lake and Palmer. No, that was removed I think in the fifth edition rules, so probably not by then, I don't know.
00:18:09
Speaker
But yes, at the time, there were things like Bayonetta 2 I think came out around that time, and Bayonetta 3 just came out this year, and its whole shtick is being ridiculously sexualised with a character who's
00:18:26
Speaker
Now, I believe I understand this correctly. Her costume is magic and made of her own hair. And she also uses her own hair for her special magical attacks. So the more powerful attacks, the more powerful the attack she does, the more of her costume disappears as her hair is rerouted into her special attacks.
Controversies and Industry Impact
00:18:46
Speaker
Kind of, although that does get us onto the Bayonetta 3 controversy. Did you follow that? I did. I mean, it didn't have much to do with the Game of Gates stuff, but controversy on this year. Yeah, so basically, Helena Taylor, who was the former voice of Bayonetta and Bayonetta 1 and 2,
00:19:06
Speaker
came out with the claim that she was only offered about US$5,000 to do the recording session for Bayneater 3, which she refused. So the role then went to Jennifer Hale, who is famous as a voice actor in the gaming industry, famously is femship in the Mass Effect games 1, 2 and 3, which is often taken to be the kind of canonical characterisation of Commander Shepard in those games.
00:19:36
Speaker
And then it turned out that not only had Helena Taylor possibly not told the truth about the pay conditions, it turned out that she was being offered around about 5000 US per session, and Platinum Games was looking at between three to five sessions to record all of the voice-over work.
00:19:57
Speaker
which means you're looking at something which is essentially larger than, say, 5,000 US. You're looking at something closer to 20,000 US. And the real contention was that Helen and Taylor wanted royalties off the back of those sessions for her role in establishing the Bayonetta character. You know, we'll kind of leave the treatment of voice actors to one side because there is a big long debate going on in the gaming media about
00:20:24
Speaker
the way in which voice actors are not particularly well paid for their work and how central they are for a lot of narrative-based games. But then it turned out that Helen the Tailor was also recommending that people wake up the game and donate the money instead to anti-abortion charities throughout the US. And that rankled some people quite substantially because it turned out it was a bit of a right-wing dick move.
00:20:53
Speaker
Yeah, I actually hadn't caught up with that. I kind of stopped paying attention to the whole thing once it got into the he-said-she-said stuff about exactly how she'd been treated. So I wasn't aware it had gone in that direction, but yeah. Yeah, which is why it kind of does circle back to the whole gamergate thing, because gamergaters, if they're one thing, they're quite conservative. Yes, no, that's definitely true.
00:21:18
Speaker
Now, also, at the start, at least, of Game of Gate, it was aimed, I guess, in some cases, at particular people, particular women, essentially, there was the ex of this original guy who wrote the original essay, but then various other people on the likes of Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and Anita Sakezian copped a hell of a lot of flack and got a hell of a lot of online hate.
00:21:43
Speaker
which these days has sort of evolved to such lovely activities as swatting and doxxing and making people move houses and all that sort of stuff. Which of course itself led to the end of 8K? What was the specific event in that case?
00:22:01
Speaker
So, Kefuls was swatted by members of a Qun for... and I think Kefuls is a her? I think she's a she as opposed to a they. Kefuls was swatted for...
00:22:17
Speaker
advocacy online leading to 8KUN sending SWAT teams to what I thought was London, UK. It turned out to be London, Ontario, because Canada has a London. She was approached by the police. I think she was taken briefly into custody based upon the swatting when things were explained. She then went to Ireland.
00:22:40
Speaker
the people at Aitkoon were then able to identify the very hotel she was staying in based upon a single photo of the bed linen when she took a photo of herself in the room which led to a second swatting attempt in Ireland which then led to Kefil's leading a campaign against many of the services which support Aitkoon which is why Aitkoon is not in a very good position these days.
00:23:09
Speaker
But at any rate, so that was the sort of stuff that was happening at the time, and I guess continues to in certain cases. And then, of course, that then led to a whole bunch of sort of false flaggy type conspiracy theories at the time, saying that having harassed these women
00:23:26
Speaker
and the woman then report on their harassment, people would then accuse them of lying and saying they're making up the harassment just so that they can get sympathy and make themselves look better.
00:23:40
Speaker
or of course the classic, they can't take a joke. I mean, sure, it looked like I was swatting them, but really I was just making fun. I was just pretending I was going to swat the person with people going, but swatting actually does occur and people have died due to swatting attempt. So even joking about swatting someone is something that many people go, I should probably take that seriously because, you know, there might be a 10 or 15% chance that this is a joke.
00:24:10
Speaker
but then there's a 85% chance it's not and then I might in the best situation have police officers turn up on my door and a moderately bad situation get arrested or a really bad situation just get shot for answering the door.
00:24:26
Speaker
So, I mean, now, as we said before, there were issue and there still are issues in gaming journalism, the especially, you know, the relationship between the big game reviewing sites and the big game developers has always been worryingly close. There's always been the perception, I think,
00:24:48
Speaker
that the big sites tend to go easy on the big games and that you don't often see really bad reviews. Even if a game isn't actually that great, it'll still just sort of get a middling score.
00:25:05
Speaker
And there's, I mean, for as long as I mentioned this back in the original episode, I remember games on the old Amiga 500 back in the 90s when I was a lad, how the Amiga game reviewing magazine, Amiga Power, after several who sort of did have a reputation for being actually critical, and if they thought a game was below average, it would get a less than 50% mark.
00:25:32
Speaker
After giving a bunch of games in the Alien Breed series Bad Reviews, it's publisher Team17, who I think is still around in some form today. They still produce the Worms game. Oh, that's right, they do, yes. They stop sending review copies. They're mostly a publisher these days, as opposed to a developer, but they still do start development duties.
00:25:52
Speaker
But yeah, so way back then, you had this thing where they just stopped sending them review copies, so the magazine just had to go out and buy a copy and review it and be a week late getting the review out or something. But I mean, just this week, I think it was, I was reading on Twitter that The Escapist was saying one particular game series wasn't
00:26:13
Speaker
going to give them review codes for Zero Punctuation because they didn't like how sarcastic Yahtzee gets in his game reviews. I can't remember which series it was, but I mean that's... Which is somewhat ironic, and this is not to finger Yahtzee here, but The Escapers was one of the few news outlets in the gaming industry at the time they came out.
00:26:36
Speaker
that was supportive of gamergate. They're going, oh, there are actually systemic issues. So it turns out the former people who ran the escapers were in fact gamergaters. So it is interesting that the worm has turned ever so slightly. It has. Yeah, so I mean, but the point is
00:26:54
Speaker
that this was not the stuff that the gamergaters were talking about at the time in terms of ethics and gaming journalism.
Gamergate's Influence on Political Movements
00:27:01
Speaker
It was all about this idea that the evil social justice warriors are running the world, which kind of takes us to today. Because, yeah, the game gamergate was how it started, but but answer me this, Em, how's it going?
00:27:17
Speaker
Well, I mean, harassment of women online by gamers continues to this day. In fact, one of the big issues in the launch of Overwatch 2 has been Blizzard trying to find a way to control the fact that gamers harass people that they take to be women or minorities with absolute vindictive pleasure. And the problem has not gone away. So in that respect,
00:27:45
Speaker
things have not improved, but I suspect you're thinking about some other gate suffixes and how those things kind of emerge from the culture that gamergates started, even if their successes have gone off in different directions. Yes, I think a lot of people sort of see gamergaters
00:28:05
Speaker
as setting the template in some cases for a lot of online behaviour or again like I said with the comparison with a single bit in a comedy routine sparking the whole Me Too movement, this sort of
00:28:26
Speaker
ballooned and ballooned and the attitudes, which were there all along, kind of spread out into other arenas and essentially ended up in President Trump. I mean, the whole evil social justice warriors, which of course was the new political correctness gone bad and the old critical race theory, if I'm getting my right wing,
00:28:53
Speaker
Memes, correct? I'm not quite sure. And that's eventually the idea that this online movement that became known as the alt-right, and the idea of owning the libs, of being against social justice warriors in all their forms, pretty much culminated in the election of Donald Trump, who was the alt-right figure, who was the anti-social justice warrior figure.
00:29:19
Speaker
So what you're saying is that by Team 17 not giving Amiga Power review copies of Alien Breed 3 The Towers, that led to the election of Donald Trump in the United States of America. One British game developer not giving a British magazine led to Donald Trump. I'm saying Team 17 is single-handedly responsible for the January 6th insurrection. That is exactly what I'm saying.
00:29:48
Speaker
I mean, I guess what I find fascinating about Gamergate and what happened afterwards is that what Gamergate shows to us is how online communities A, work and can become kind of vicious echo chambers, but also B, how opportunistic people from pre-existing political movements kind of moved in and colonised those spaces.
00:30:17
Speaker
So there's been a lot of work that's looked into how online spaces work and how radicalization works. And so talking about some of the stuff that went on during the pandemic back in Aotearoa, New Zealand, what we saw in a lot of telegram groups would be you'd get people who were kind of unified around a particular topic, say the topic being they're scared of what's in the vaccines. And then what happens is that a few
00:30:46
Speaker
anti-Semitic neo-Nazis turn up and they start making claims about oh you do know you know it's the jews who are behind the vaccines the jewish people they're the real threat here and what you find is there's a section of the community which is happy to go well look we both agree vaccines are bad so i mean you've got some weird views about vaccines but you know everybody has weird views about vaccines
00:31:12
Speaker
I don't I don't necessarily like what you're saying but I'm going to in that terrible term support your right to say it. There'll be a section of the community that will go yeah I mean I don't I don't like the vaccines but this this Nazi stuff don't really like that so they leave they they leave the community and stop giving feedback to what's going on there and then of course the people who were already in the community who were
00:31:38
Speaker
already a little bit anti-Semitic themselves have those views reinforced by the anti-Semites having come in to kind of co-op the community. And I think what happened with the Gamergate phenomena is that there were pre-existing bad actors out there who went
00:31:56
Speaker
people are a little bit conservative leaning and I've got a conservative story that I want to sell them which then kind of radicalize that particular group and then by ostracizing the people who weren't happy being in
00:32:12
Speaker
a radical echo chamber led to further and further polarisation leading to Gamagate going from perhaps a few people mistakenly thinking it's about ethics and game dualism to being
00:32:28
Speaker
women are destroying the world and Anita Sarkeesian is deliberately the reason why we don't get buffed men on the covers of video games anymore. Yes, no, exactly. Gamergate didn't invent these attitudes, but it was the thing that went viral, essentially. It was the gateway drug for a lot of gamers to find out about right-wing views.
00:32:56
Speaker
So, I mean, Gameygate was followed by Pizzagate, which was another sort of an isolated event sort of. That was a gate about ethics and pizza making. And pizza making, exactly. And also child trafficking and...
00:33:11
Speaker
I mean, I don't want my pizza made by people. Well, no, obviously, no, who would? I would like there to be ethics in pizza making. I really would. I'm actually, I will say this now.
00:33:26
Speaker
If you're a pedophile or child trafficker, I don't want to eat a pizza you've made. No, I think that's quite a fair statement. Harsh but fair. But no, sort of pizza gate then ended up metastasizing.
00:33:41
Speaker
into QAnon, sort of, or again, it was a little thing that got jumped on by a whole bunch of pre-existing people who were with a bunch of pre-existing axes to grind and sort of got sucked into and formed a part of the thing which eventually these days is QAnon. And some people, there are people, I found an article looking at this, The Washington Post,
00:34:01
Speaker
back in 2016, had an article called, if we took Gameygate harassment seriously, Pizzagate might never have happened. So we're not saying that Gameygate led directly to Pizzagate, but it showed people how to make a thing like Pizzagate turn into a thing like QAnon, I guess.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yeah, and as we saw with the treatment of gamer gators engaging in swatting activities, the lack of consequences to those activities, to the instigators, kind of led people to go, well, we can make bigger, bolder claims elsewhere. So there is a literature on the fact that, you know, people who did swat other people in situations where people came to know harm of life,
00:34:52
Speaker
judges we could oh you know it's just a foolish young man engaging in foolish youthful activity I mean we really can't hold them responsibility for these particular actions which did create a kind of culture of
00:35:05
Speaker
You can kind of get away with sending police to people you don't like. It's kind of an acceptable activity. And there are consequences to making actions like that permissible in your society. So, um, Snopes has an article called What Was Game Again? Snopes? Snopes? Snopes?
00:35:27
Speaker
And Snopes might also have an article on it, but I haven't read it. I don't visit them anymore. I don't like some of the things they had to say. But no, this article published this year, April of this year, says
00:35:42
Speaker
Post-Gamergate, the Trump-worshipping QAnon movement, with its vast skean of interlinked conspiracy theories claiming, for example, that prominent Democrats are satanic child sex traffickers who drink the blood of babies, was born on 4chan and flourished on 8chan. Gamergate laid the groundwork, and in many ways set the tone, for that fanatical movement.
00:36:02
Speaker
So it was, yeah, I think we pretty much covered it. It was the inciting incident. It didn't invent it, it didn't create it, but it became something that people could focus on and build upon.
00:36:18
Speaker
And of course, part of the problem with the Gamergate movement was that because people didn't take their claim, it's about ethics and game journalism seriously.
Community and Discourse in Gamergate
00:36:27
Speaker
And quite rightly, people didn't take it seriously because it wasn't actually what they were claiming, but because ostensibly, that was what it was about. And people were going, well, you don't think that is. They felt like they were themselves a marginalized community being ignored.
00:36:45
Speaker
And you do find in some of those communities this kind of weird backfire effect of, well, I mean, I know what I'm saying is right and nobody believes me. And you think what you're saying is right and nobody believes you as well. Well, you must be right because I know I'm right and I'm being ignored. And you're someone who's being ignored. So you must be right as well. So come join our community.
00:37:09
Speaker
and it allows for people who simply feel that they're not part of the conversation to go, well, at least we've got each other because no one else is listening to us. And I mean, we can extend that right into the present moment because when we look at all the, it's been fun to look at what's been going on with Twitter and Elon Musk flailing around trying to make money and firing everybody and not appearing to know what he's doing.
00:37:39
Speaker
But at least some of his motivation in buying it in the first place was this idea that Twitter is run by the liberal left. It's full of these social justice warriors who are censoring the right and amplifying the left. And so something needs to be done about it in the interests of free speech, which
00:38:08
Speaker
it seems to be that exact same idea that we saw right back in the start of Gaming Gate just carrying through to the current day.
00:38:16
Speaker
Elon Musk does seem like he would have been a gamer gator back in those days. In fact, I actually wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that he was a gamer gator back in those days. It's hard to know what's going on in them. There's a tweet I've seen going around a bunch of times in the past. I can't remember who it was and I can't remember exactly what they said, but the gist of it was
00:38:38
Speaker
that simply being a billionaire in the position of being able to buy literally anything, do pretty much anything, being able to buy politics, buy something like Twitter, which is essentially part of the infrastructure of the internet these days,
00:38:58
Speaker
Simply, the basic quote was that the cognitive impairment of living like that must be like getting kicked in the head by a horse every day. It really must mess with your head, so who knows exactly what's going on with the dude. But it doesn't need to be anything good.
00:39:14
Speaker
not good at all indeed in the bonus episode we'll be talking about Elon Musk's pickle pickle and also the fact that what
Long-term Effects on Internet Culture
00:39:24
Speaker
he's done is basically made some of the work that was going on internationally to make Twitter and other social media spaces better probably has now stopped
00:39:37
Speaker
So there was just one other thing I felt I felt had to be mentioned which was... Now you're gonna bring up truth in science fiction media. I am because I was looking I was looking through this so you know what came after Game of Gate and along came another term which we talked about at the time but which I'd blissfully forgotten all about and that was the sad puppies. Who remembers the sad puppies? That was that was it the Hugo's was it?
00:40:04
Speaker
It was. Yeah, so this was the attempt. So the Hugo's tend to run on slates where there's the nominees.
00:40:12
Speaker
and then there are kind of voting packets and people kind of vote according to a particular slate so there are recommendations vote for the short story this book this documentary and a whole bunch of old white men once again got really annoyed that suddenly books which didn't feature them as main characters were winning Hugo Awards left
00:40:35
Speaker
Left and centre, not left, right. No, obviously not. Left and centre. So they tried to organise slates for one year. They were actually quite successful in gaming the system to ensure that a lot of very low quality, but quite right wing media
00:40:53
Speaker
won a number of awards. And so you got the sad puppy slate. Now, the Hugo's reacted to this in such a way that they made this kind of slating things impossible to win in the future. But yes, there are a whole bunch of old white men who were very, very concerned that they were no longer the main characters in the books they liked to read.
00:41:16
Speaker
There was there an offshoot of the sad puppies? Was it like the angry puppies or rabid puppies or something? I can't do this anymore. Yeah, there were competing right-wing slates depending on whether they were as right-wing as they could be. But both have basically lost ground now with the new Hugo system.
00:41:37
Speaker
But yes, reminding me, reading again about the sad puppies and the likes of the Proud Boys, and have you reminded me of a recent tweet from the heroically ginger British comedian, Alastair Beckett King, which I did actually write down, note down this time, where he recently said, why are far-right militias so bad at coming up with names? They're either called something obviously evil, like the Forsworn Brotherhood, or they turn up with t-shirts that say, the Pudding Pants Brigade.
00:42:04
Speaker
And I really hope the term the Pudding Pants Brigade becomes a mean, becomes a generic term any time one of these bunches of idiots show up with a stupid nickname for themselves. I will be doing my part to make that happen. I like ABK. He almost does as good a Poirot impression as I do. Almost. Almost. I mean, really, it's such a thing possible, obviously. Obviously. I mean, as you say, it's like having David Suchet
00:42:29
Speaker
in the room even when you're on the other side of the world talking to me by zoom it's like he's in the room with me right now it is a world-class impression and don't let anyone tell you otherwise so yeah that was gamergate um i i feel like perhaps we should apologize for making people think about gamergate again if they hadn't for a while but um
Mainstream Gaming and Fandom Dynamics
00:42:52
Speaker
it is interesting to see just just how it came how how it's i mean it was it was so big at one point on the well yeah big on the internet doesn't always yeah and it's like but it wasn't very big outside of social media if you were online gamergate was huge but if you talk to other people
00:43:16
Speaker
Gaming was still very much a fringe activity. It became suddenly quite popular online to admit that people like playing computer games. For a long period of time people played computer games. They just didn't talk about the fact that they enjoyed it. In the same respect there's a big debate going on in
00:43:36
Speaker
genre media at the moment that with things the success of Lord of the Rings, success of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, what used to be a kind of fringe nerdy activity to put in scare quotes is now actually major popular mainstream
00:43:57
Speaker
entertainment where MCU films make large amounts of money every single time they get released. You can no longer say that being a fan of superheroes is a fringe activity and that's leading towards people in some of those fandoms.
00:44:16
Speaker
It's terrible, this influx of new people enjoying our media. That was my media, my media, which is leading to a lot of bad stuff going on in those fandoms. So Game of Gate was just the start of realizing that there is a kind of toxic core at the heart of every fandom.
00:44:37
Speaker
And often the reason why those fandoms were never as successful as they could have been was due to the policing actions of that toxic core going, no it belongs to me, not to everyone, just to me.
00:44:53
Speaker
Yes, there was always a debate among people who were familiar with them as to who were the worst fans. Was it comic book fans or Star Wars fans or Tolkien fans or what have you? And of course the real answer obviously was Iron Man fans, but that's completely beside the point.
00:45:09
Speaker
I remember at the time of GamerGate, I remember once when I was in my workplace at the time, saying to my work mates, have you guys heard of GamerGate? And not one of them had, because they were not online gaming people. But the fact that it hadn't hit the mainstream at the time doesn't change the fact that the attitudes behind it very much have hit the mainstream and beyond.
00:45:38
Speaker
But enough, enough, enough depressing people being stupid material. Let's move on to brighter pastures. I believe we're going to talk about Elon Musk's sperm.
00:45:48
Speaker
We are, and also, his children. Well, I assume that's where his children come from. Billionaires don't reproduce differently from the rest of us, do they? Do they? How would we know? How would we know? But yes, we'll be talking about the reproductive habits of various rich people in the bonus episode for this week. So I can think of nothing more enticing
00:46:13
Speaker
to get our patrons flooding towards us, giving us money, so to hear us talk about the emissions. To hear us dunk on Elon Musk's spunk. Oh, you got a rhyme in. You got a rhyme. Everything that rhymes is true. That's a known fact. You just won this episode. So really, there's nothing more for me to say. I can't top that. I literally can't top that. I do, of course, have to say that if you want to become a patron and hear us, go on, give us the line again.
00:46:42
Speaker
If you want to hear us, don't go on, Elon Musk Spunk. Ah, classic. Go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up. And if for some reason, if you've recently suffered some sort of horrible mind-altering drugs mishap and you don't want to hear us talk about the bodily emissions of certain moneyed individuals, you don't have to.
00:47:08
Speaker
That's fine. You just listen to these main episodes because you're our audience and without you, we'd be probably a bunch of insane lunatics arguing about ethics in podcasting or something because no one's listening to us, I don't know.
00:47:23
Speaker
I mean, I'd still be an associate professor of philosophy. Well, yeah, no, you would actually, yeah. Or be almost certainly, yeah. Yeah, nah, probably a lot of things to do. Arguably, maybe not having this podcast. This podcast could have slowed down my ascent to those heights. Could have been holding us both back. We could be billionaires right now if we hadn't been doing this podcast for the last eight years. We could be heroes.
00:47:43
Speaker
but just for one day. So, yeah, why don't we not missing that much. Right-o. I think that's it. I think we're done. We've said everything we need to say and rhymed while we did it. Well, you did anyway. So, in that case, really, there's nothing else to say but a bit of the old-fashioned goodbye. I'm off to dunk on some spunk.
00:48:09
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Ederson and Imdentive. If you'd like to help support us, please find details at our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
00:48:41
Speaker
Marty, we've got to go back to the conspiracy. Notationally your episode to edit this week. So why don't you play the sting for a change? Why don't you play the sting for a change? Fine. Who knows what I'm going to put in here? It could be literally, I just might find whatever sound effect I feel I can chuck it in here because that's the power I wield. The best ripping fat noise you can possibly make. Oh, I've made several. Anyway. So is your mum.
00:49:10
Speaker
I mean, so is everyone's mum. It's how the human body works. It's a miracle of nature. So is your mum. Yes, thank you.